AN APPRECIATION

Roger Ebert: Quintessential Chicagoan

April 04, 2013|Mark Caro

Movie critic Roger Ebert gives the thumbs-up as he arrives at a ceremony to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Hollywood in 2005. (Reuters)

When Anthony Bourdain was in town last summer taping a Chicago-themed episode of his Travel Channel show “The Layover,” he asked various people, including me, to name the quintessential Chicagoan, and a consensus quickly emerged.

The answer wasn't Oprah Winfrey or Michael Jordan, who both always seemed more in Chicago than of Chicago. It wasn't Cubs-going actors such as Jim Belushi, Vince Vaughn or John Cusack. It wasn't musical superstars such as Jennifer Hudson, Kanye West, Billy Corgan or (shudder the thought) R. Kelly. It wasn't ex-Mayor Richard M. Daley or current Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

It was Roger Ebert.

My gut reaction to Bourdain's poll result was “Of course.” Yours may be too. That answer just feels right.

Yet let's take a step back and consider this: Chicago self-identifies as a gritty, approachable, no-nonsense city — “big shoulders” and all that.

Ebert, who died Thursday at age 70 after a long cancer battle, was a film critic, and our society views critics as being about as far from “one of us” as one can get. Critics are snooty and elitist and doing something that almost anyone with an Internet connection now thinks he or she could do better.

And Ebert, though often embraced by Hollywood, took his most memorable critical stands on behalf of art films (such as “My Dinner With Andre” and the almost-four-hour version of “Once Upon a Time in America”) and documentaries (“Hoop Dreams”), movies that in their lifetimes grossed less than what “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” made in its opening midnight showings on a Wednesday.

Ebert called “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” “a horrible experience of unbearable length.”

His best movie of 2011 was the Iranian drama “A Separation.”

Yet Ebert was The Man, the guy we all related to and respected, a down-to-earth populist who just happened to have more money and fame than your average bear.

Bourdain summed up Ebert's appeal in an email Thursday: “He was never a snob. He loved — truly loved — pleasures high and low. He had impeccable taste in films, in bars, in friends. … His Twitter feed was invaluable. He had an acute sense of social justice. He was loyal to great saloons — even long after he quit drinking. Like Chicago itself, he had a low threshold for (baloney).”

As many Chicagoans did, I first encountered Ebert and his TV sparring partner, Gene Siskel, in the Sun-Times and Tribune, respectively, but I grew to “know” them over the course of their various movie-reviewing shows: the short-lived “Opening Soon … at a Theater Near You,” followed by the more successful “Sneak Previews,” “At the Movies” and “Siskel & Ebert & the Movies” (later shortened to “Siskel & Ebert”).

So much has been written and said about their unlikely success that I'll keep it simple: They were intelligent, good-humored, regular-looking guys arguing about movies with a passion that was infectious, all while revealing advance film clips before such things had become ubiquitous.

Siskel was the more aggressive — and arguably more effective — debater: My mental picture of them is the lanky Siskel pitching forward and pointing and Ebert leaning back with his arms outstretched in a sort of “Gimme a break” pose.

But, no offense to the late, whip-smart Siskel, Ebert was The Writer of the pair, the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism (in 1975) and someone whose prose could both sing and sound remarkably like he talked. Ebert wrote a lot, and he wrote fast, and some of the pieces did feel tossed-off, but many others surprised you with his insights and eloquence.

Back before major daily newspapers started their massive retrenchment, most were employing two — or in The New York Times' case, three — full-time film critics to handle the ever-proliferating volume of movies coming out of Hollywood and the indie/international film scenes. But at the Sun-Times, Ebert was reviewing just about every major release every single week. A freelancer or other staffer picked up a stray review here and there, but if a movie was going to be part of the national discussion, Ebert would be the one weighing in on it.

This was while he was preparing for and taping weekly TV shows and making the rounds of talk shows and other public arenas that demanded a celebrity of his stature.